Places, Spaces & Faces
“We don’t actually know what the services are, nobody is advertising them to us.”
Many dads told us that they hadn’t engaged in any services as information about what was on offer to them as a dad locally had never reached them. Others had attempted to find things themselves and found the information available very difficult to navigate.
The majority of dads spent little (if any) time within the ‘spaces’ of the system i.e. maternity services, Family Hubs and health visiting settings. Despite this, the routes for dissemination and awareness-raising of the available support for dads often sat within the system, for example posters within Family Hubs and information on maternity or health visiting websites.
This issue is particularly likely to perpetuate the exclusion of certain groups that services have been less able to reach, for example dads with mental health issues, dads from minoritised communities and dads living in poverty or financial hardship.
Many dads did however spend time in other spaces specifically designed for parents and babies. These included spaces such as soft play centres, libraries and public playgrounds. One dad suggested that it made sense to collaborate with these types of locations to make support available in places they were already engaged with, or at least to use these spaces to raise awareness of the other things on offer.
“They should just have this stuff at soft play.”
Some dads gained almost all of their information about things happening in the area (for example baby classes etc.) through local Whatsapp groups of other parents, or peer groups so these types of spaces must not be forgotten when trying to reach out to dads.
How are you currently reaching out to dads, either in your individual role or as a service?
What efforts are made to think about the places that dads do access and how you could enter into those spaces to reach dads ‘where they are at’?
What other local services exist that do reach dads that you could speak to and/or think about collaborating with?
Do you know what digital spaces dads are spending time in? How are you reaching into these spaces?
What other local settings, people or groups are popular with local dads that you could engage with to market your services?
Get Practical
Here are some suggestions for getting started. Check out the Resources & Worksheets section at the bottom of the page for useful tools to support you.
Make a list of all the places a local dad might interact with - how many of these are you in touch with or collaborating with to reach more dads?
Are there particular groups of dads who you are struggling to reach? What identity-specific spaces are there that are supporting those dads well? If you don’t know, it’s time to do some research.
If you find there are services that are popular with dads, for example local play groups or soft play centres, can you attend these spaces to observe how they are meeting dads’ needs? Try the P.O.E.M.S framework to help with your observations.
Go out and speak to some dads! Where are they spending their time? What services do they access? What businesses are they interacting with? Why? Are there ways you can collaborate with these businesses? You could try using this Explorative Interview toolkit to help you to formulate your questions.
Check out what digital parenting resources and groups exist locally? Can you ask some parents?
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P.O.E.M.S Framework - useful for guiding your observations in spaces that are popular with dads to understand how their needs are being met in those spaces.
Explorative Interview Toolkit - useful for exploring the everyday life of people and gaining a deep understanding, including exploring cultural and social aspects that may influence these.